“If you don’t think this country is sliding towards theocracy, then you haven’t been paying attention.”
—Charles M. Blow New York Times, Feb. 21st 2024
Democracy in America, that self-styled “leader of the free world” is in trouble. People may think the threat comes from this year’s Presidential Election will be between soo-to-be-octogenarians, who should have retired years ago. Though this is a worry, more of a worry is the delusional bombast and miasmic morals of the most egotistical president America never should have had.
But the most worrying of all is that Trump’s bombast commands the support from one half of the institutionalised parties in the USA: the Republicans. Once staid and genteel, the GOP has gone off the political reservation. In all 250 years of its existence, only they or the Democrats have controlled the United States. Trump’s 2016-2020 tenure in the White House erased what little bi-partisan mechanism remained between them. The behind-the-scenes co-operation that served America so well up to the 1990s is now just a memory.
A major factor leading to this is religious extremism. 250 years ago, the “Founding Fathers” quite deliberately excluded religion from the U.S. Constitution. James Madison had seen his home state of Virginia arrest itinerant preachers for undermining the established church. He demurred, believing men had a right to the free exercise of religion.
In his “Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments,” he explained not just religion, but representative government were both at stake. The establishment of one religion over others attacked the unalienable right of conscience. If lawmakers could destroy freedom of conscience, they could destroy all other unalienable rights, throwing democracy out the window and becoming tyrants.
But in the 1860’s, The Confederacy rejected the idea of popular government, maintaining instead that a few Americans should make the rules for the majority. They not only invoked “the favour and guidance of Almighty God” in their Constitution, they established as their motto “Deo vindice,” or “God will vindicate.” This thinking has a long history across the “Bible Belt” states of the South.
The depth of feeling in this area was highlighted this week when the Alabama Supreme Court declared that cells kept frozen for artificial insemination were children. Judge Tom Parke took the “theologically based view of the sanctity of life”. In this, he has substantial support for this view among MAGA Republicans’.
“Embryos, to me, are babies.”
—Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley
A number of hospitals in the South have ended their popular IVF programs out of fear of prosecution, And, if you think Speaker Lindsey Hoyle was being partisan when he made a mess of parliamentary procedure on February 21st, try this for size:
“The United States is a Christian nation, and I call for biblically sanctioned government. Sometimes what your constituents want does not line up with the principles God gave us for government. You must have conviction enough to stand up to your own people.”
—House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson
But this noisy minority does not speak either for the bulk of America, nor for the princples upon which the country was founded and has since prospered.
#1099—531 words
davidsberry 
The current political imbalance of the Supreme Court becomes even more unbalanced when viewed on a Religious scale. The current Court has six Catholics in the majority: Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett, plus a liberal Catholic (Justice Sotomayor), a Jew (Justice Kagan), and a Protestant (Justice Ketanji Brown). No atheists or agnostics, no Islamic presence. Certainly not representative of the American people they sway with their heavy gavel. While 70% of Americans do identify as a branch of Christianity, 23% are religiously unaffiliated, and 5% identify with non-Christian religions. The numbers in the Supreme court are more in line with a court that may have existed during the Spanish Inquisition than in a modern Democracy.